Patients with mental illness fare worse after hip surgery
BY MADELINE KENNEDY

(Reuters Health) – People with psychiatric illnesses are more likely to have complications after hip replacement surgery, according to a recent analysis.

This added risk is something doctors and patients should discuss in advance, the study team writes in The Journal of Arthroplasty.

Previous studies have linked depression and other mental illnesses to greater complications after surgery and worse outcomes for patients, the researchers note.

In particular, patients with psychiatric disease are known to have more complications after cardiac, spine and general surgery, lead author Dr. Mitchell Klement told Reuters Health.

“We wanted to see if the same effect was true in total hip replacements,” said Klement, an orthopedic surgery resident at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.

Read the original article on Reuters. Copyright 2016. Follow Reuters on Twitter.

SOURCE: bit.ly/1Qqh4FM The Journal of Arthroplasty, online March 17, 2016.